Under the tort claim settlement announced by the Justice Department, Ramirez Medina will be allowed to apply for “other immigration relief” during that four-year period. The department said that ICE cannot “use any record or statement made before May 15, 2018, in evaluating any of Mr. Ramirez Medina’s applications and specifically will not consider any allegation that he is a gang member or a threat to public safety.”
U.S. Attorney Nick Brown said the settlement “essentially gives Mr. Ramirez Medina a clean slate” as he works to pursue legal status. Ramirez Medina’s attorney, Luis Cortes, told The Seattle Times that he and his client were pleased with the result.
“This four-year deferral demonstrates that the government is conceding that Daniel is not a gang member and not a threat to the community,” Cortes told The Seattle Times. “This was the main issue that my client wanted out there. It was important to him that he clear his name, for his son and for the future.” The report said that Ramirez Medina is the father of a 9-year-old U.S. citizen child.
That ICE is blocked from using its lies against future petitions by Ramirez Medina is critical. Swept up in a raid that was actually targeting his dad, Ramirez Medina’s lawyers said that officials had falsified a document in order to make it look like he’d claimed he had gang affiliations, The Stranger reported in 2017. Attorney Mark Rosenbaum called it “one of the most serious examples of governmental misconduct that I have come across in my 40 years of practice,” the outlet said at the time.
But officials were on a roll. That same year, emboldened ICE agents would sweep up dozens of undocumented high school students and also falsely accuse them of being gang members. One teen spent a month in detention before being released due to lack of evidence. She subsequently said she was terrified of continuing her education, NPR reported at the time. “I’m scared to go back to that school,” she said in the report. Yet again that same year, border agents detained DACA recipients for hours at a time at a checkpoint in Texas. Lawyers said they’d never seen anything like it before.
The lie against Ramirez Medina could also be easily disproven by the fact that immigrants have to undergo background checks when they apply for or renew DACA protections. He “had no criminal record and twice passed background checks,” The Seattle Times notes.
The Justice Department said in its release that under the agreement, none of the parties involved are admitting any fault. That may be the official agreement, but it’s certainly more than clear to the rest of us who wasn’t at fault here. Recall that the previous administration also snooped around for any evidence of crime in order to justify the racist decision to revoke temporary protections from Haitian immigrants.
While Ramirez Medina said following his release that he was going to fight to win back his DACA status, it’s unclear if that was successful. DACA remains shut off entirely to new applicants due to Republicans, who have gone to right-wing courts to try to kill the successful and popular policy. A framework that would have passed permanent relief for young immigrants like Ramirez Medina included harsh border measures in order to lure in GOP support, but they rejected it in order to keep using immigrants as a political tool.
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